Em.'s In & Outs

I have recently gotten news about going to work in Burkina Faso with WUSC-Uniterra, as part of the twelve-months co-op placement for my university degree. I'll be (most likely) working on monitoring and evaluation of income-generating activities with people with HIV AIDS, focusing on women cooperatives in the shea butter industry. This is a chance for me to explore emerging sectors in economics that are somehow more related to my interests than, say, price theory. With so many people living from AIDS, and with the all the social stigma surrounding being HIV positive, I can hardly think of better way to regain one's dignity than being capable of staying independent. With AIDS being so often dismissed as being a ''women's disease'', and female patients' lifestyles being pointed out as the cause of its evils, it is interesting to see how the idea of fair trade (and the business and marketing side it involves) can contribute to alienate this bias. More on this later.